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While working with developers over the past several months, a common request has been access to the source code for customization, extension, and to help with bug hunting. As previously promised, we’ve provided some developers with early access to the source code for our iOS library, and intend to make it publicly available soon under the MIT license. Unobfuscated source code for our JavaScript library will also be made available.

It’s been a month since we launched our beta. Over 1300 developers have signed up to move data with Simperium, and we’re working hard to help you release live apps to production.

We spoke to a lot of you over the past few weeks. We know trust is key. You can’t commit to a service without knowing how it sustains itself, or what will happen if it goes away. With that in mind, we’re announcing pricing today together with our open source strategy.

Pricing

The Basic Plan is free and gives you access to all features for development and prototyping, and up to 2,500 active users per month for production.

Beyond that, a Pro Plan supports 2,501 to 75,000 active monthly users for $99 to $1499 per month. For those with more than 75,000 active monthly users, or if your needs don’t map well to active users, a Premium Plan is available with volume discounts and custom pricing.

All plans include everything you need to move structured data across mobile, web, and your backend services, including persistence, versioning, firehose access, and conflict resolution on our hosted servers. Support for large binary data (like images and audio) is coming later.

Open source

Sometimes a hosted solution isn’t appropriate. Or perhaps you need maximum confidence and control. To that end, we’re open sourcing Simperium starting with our client libraries, and followed by our protocol with a reference server implementation.

It’s been over a week since we launched Simperium to the public, and we’re really happy with the response so far. Throughout our development we spoke to dozens of developers, from independents to very large companies. We blended your feedback with our experience building Simplenote to create a service that focuses entirely on the data layer. This means we focus on the tough problems associated with moving data among devices, people, apps and backend services.

Developers seem to appreciate this focus. In practice, it means that going up the stack, Simperium can integrate with tools like Core Data, Backbone.js, and PhoneGap. And going down the stack, Simperium can work with providers like Heroku while integrating with services like Twilio and Urban Airship. We believe this downward flexibility is particularly important. You can create unique services that help your app stand out, and you maintain control of your data (compared to services like iCloud that lock it all away).

That’s the developer perspective. But we’re product people at heart. Simperium arose from Simplenote, which itself arose from our frustration with moving text between our computers and our phones. The lack of a good solution pained us. Our ultimate motivation today, as it was then, is to improve the lives of users.

When you use Simperium as your data layer, your users will never be blocked by network progress indicators. They’ll enjoy access to their data across all their devices. They’ll be able to work offline with full read/write access. And they’ll be able to share and collaborate with the simple act of associating an email address with some data.

That’s the world we want to live in. All these goals (and more that we’re not talking about yet) are about moving data. We see an opportunity to focus on moving data the same way Google focused on searching data, and we look forward to the many challenges and discoveries that lie ahead.